This Angel is pissed off. I'm Nurse Anne and I work on large general medical ward in the NHS. These are the wards with the most issues surrounding nursing care. The problems are mostly down to intentional understaffing by hospital chiefs that result in a lack of real nurses on the wards.
"The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain, for they merely make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy and the narrow more narrow"-Florence Nightengale

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

The Daily Mail is so Fucked up.

This article is a few months old. I guess I am really slow. Definitely not as slow as the person who wrote the article below however.

I can't even begin to comment on this. It is so full of inaccuracies. Makes me weep when I realise that people actually believe this shit. No mention of the fact that the NHS runs acute 30 bed ward with 2 RNs who are scared shitless that someone will die because they couldn't be ten places at once. Their only help AT ALL is a couple of untrained kids who have no idea what is going on and wander around aimlessly wearing nurses' uniforms. A nurse in that position cannot be caring or focus on basic care without getting someone fucking killed get it? No mention of the fact that these are the wards where are elderly patients are sent. Sometimes I just find it all too painful to comment on in an articulate manner. No shit the patients think we are cruel can't be bothered, we are running past them faster than the speed of light.

And no Rona, we are not running around trying to play doctor and diagnose patients. We are not obsessed with the medical model of care...far from it kiddo.

17 comments:

Oh and I'll just add this in case anyone reading this is mildly retarted.

1. Project 2000 is loooong dead.

2. University/academic trained nurses spend a hell of a lot of time on the wards learning about hands on care.

3.If you expect a nurse with an unmanageable workload of acute patients to mop floors and brows and hold hands you are a fucktard. Those things can only be done if she has a manageable number of stable patients.

4. The vast majority of specialist nurses who work away from the bedside are dinosaurs who trained in the "good" old days.

I do think anonymous is wrong. I read multiple media and think the Mail is much more upmarket than The Sun or The Daily Mirror.

Perhaps their heart is in the right place and they are indeed fighting for the elderly. Why do you not suggest you write a column for them. See them as a friend and as not as an enemy. I do understand (as a GP) that their stance is well intentioned and I am sure if my colleagues could locate me, they would probably kill me for this comment. I think you should embrace the perceived enemy as a possible friend.

Apologies for the misspelt comment last night. If you think the Daily Mails heart is in the right place so be it, spend a few days reading its website. The comments from the readers can be especially enlightening. It has a vendetta at the moment against the Liverpool Care Pathway, or Death Pathway as they call it making emotive and unresearched comments on it. It has no understanding of what modern nurses do. It is anti immunisation, the recent story about the poor teenager in Coventry led to some particularly irresponsible journalism on their part. It is pro BNP and racist in its slant on reporting. As Anne said, they have an agenda, they always have.

I am a nurse. I have written emotive and articulate letters to the Daily Mail on many occasions, regarding the absolute difficulties/impossibilites in providing adequate care to the elderly due to NHS nurse staffing. I either get no response, or "we will not be publishing your letter on this occasion..."

In an atmosphere if universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell.

Why has Nursing Care Deteriorated

Good nurses are failing every day to provide their patients with a decent standard of care. You want to know what has happened? Read this book and understand that similiar things have happened in the UK. Similiar causes, similiar consequences. And remember this. The failings in care have nothing to do with educated nurses or nurses who don't care. We need more well educated nurses on the wards rather than intentional short staffing by management.

About Me

I am a university educated registered nurse. We had a hell of a lot of hands on practice as well as our academic courses. The only people who say that you don't need a brain or an education to be an RN are the people who do not have any direct experience of nursing in acute care on today's wards. I have yet to meet a nurse who thinks that she is above providing basic care. I work with nurses who are completely unable to provide basic care due to ward conditions.
I have lived and worked in 3 countries and have seen more similarities than differences. I have been a qualified nurse for nearly 15 years. I never used to use foul language until working on the wards got to me. It's a mess everywhere, not just the NHS.
Hospital management is slashing the numbers of staff on the ward whilst filling us up with more patients than we can handle... patients who are increasingly frail. After an 8-14 hour shift without stopping once we have still barely scratched the surface of being able to do what we need to do for our patients.

Quotes of Interest. Education of Nurses.

Hospitals with higher proportions of baccalaureate-prepared nurses tended to have lower 30-day mortality rates. Our findings indicated that a 10% increase in the proportion of baccalaureate prepared nurses was associated with 9 fewer deaths for every 1,000 discharged patients."...Journal of advanced nursing 2007

THIS MEANS WE NEED WELL EDUCATED NURSES AT THE BEDSIDE NOT IN ADVANCED ROLES

Dr. Linda Aiken and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania identified a clear link between higher levels of nursing education and better patient outcomes. This extensive study found that surgical patients have a "substantial survival advantage" if treated in hospitals with higher proportions of nurses educated at the baccalaureate or higher degree level.

THIS MEANS WE NEED WELL EDUCATED NURSES AT THE BEDSIDE NOT IN ADVANCED ROLES

Dr. Linda Aiken and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research found that patients experienced significantly lower mortality and failure to rescue rates in hospitals where more highly educated nurses are providing direct patient care.

Evidence shows that nursing education level is a factor in patient safety and quality of care. As cited in the report When Care Becomes a Burden released by the Milbank Memorial Fund in 2001, two separate studies conducted in 1996 - one by the state of New York and one by the state of Texas - clearly show that significantly higher levels of medication errors and procedural violations are committed by nurses prepared at the associate degree and diploma levels as compared with the baccalaureate level.

Registered Nurse Staffing Ratios

International Council of Nurses Fact Sheet:

In a given unit the optimal workload for a registered nurse was four patients. Increasing the workload to 6 resulted in patients being 14% more likely to die within 30 days of admission.

A workload of 8 patients versus 4 was associated with a 31% increase in mortality. (In the NHS RN's each have anywhere from 10-35 patients per RN. It doesn't need to be this way..Anne)

Registered Nurses in NHS hospitals usually have between 10 and 30+ patients each on general wards.

Earlier in the year, the New England Journal of Medicine published results from another study of similar genre reported by a different group of nurse researchers. In that paper, Needleman et al3 examined whether different levels of nurse staffing are related to a patient’s risk of developing complications or of dying. Data from more than 5 million medical patient discharges and more than 1.1 million surgical patient discharges from 799 hospitals in 11 different states revealed that patients receiving more care from RNs (compared to licensed practical nurses and nurses’ aides) and those receiving the most hours of care per day from RNs experienced fewer complications and lower mortality rates than those who received more of their care from licensed practical nurses and/or aides. Specifically for medical patients, those who received more hours per day of care from an RN and/or those who had a greater proportions of their care provided by RNs experienced statistically significant shorter length of stay and lower complication rates (urinary tract infections, gastrointestinal bleeding, pneumonia, cardiac arrest, or shock), as well as fewer deaths from these and other (sepsis, deep vein thrombosis) complications

•Lower levels of hospital registered nurse staffing are associated with more adverse outcomes such as Pneumonia, pressure sores and death.
•Patients have higher acuity, yet the skill levels of the nursing staff have declined as hospitals replace RN's with untrained carers.
•Higher acuity patients and the added responsibilities that come with them increase the registered nurse workload.
•Avoidable adverse outcomes such as pneumonia can raise treatment costs by up to $28,000.
•Hiring more RNs does not decrease profits. (Hospital bosses don't understand this. They think that they will save money by shedding real nurses in favour of carers and assistants. The damage done to the patients as a result of this costs more moneyi.e expensive deaths, complications,and lawsuits, and complaints....Anne)

Disclaimer

I know I swear too much. I am truly very sorry if you are offended. Please do not visit my blog if foul language upsets you. I want to help people. That is why I started this blog and that is why I became a Nurse. I won't run away from Nursing just yet. I want to stick around and make things better. I don't want the nurses caring for me when I am sick working in the same conditions that I am. Of course this is all just a figmant of my imagination anyway and I am not even in this reality. Or am I?Any opinions expressed in my posts are mine and mine alone and do not represent the viewpoint of the NHS, the RCN, God, or anyone else.